Ishikawa Toraji (石川寅治) (artist 1875 – 1964)
Dance or Odori (踊り) from the series Ten Types of Female Nudes (Rajo jūsshu - 裸女十種)
1934
Signed: Ishikawa
Artist's seal: Tora
Printer: Matsuzaki Keizaburō (松崎啓三郎摺)
Carver: Kazue Yamagishi (山岸主計彫)
Brooklyn Museum of Art
Achenbach Foundation
National Gallery of Victoria - all ten prints from this set are illustrated at this link
National Diet Library - in black and white - go to #12
Museum für angewandte Kunst, Vienna
Nihon no hanga
Los Angeles County Museum of Art "One of the most celebrated and controversial series of prints of this dynamic era is Toraji Ishikawa’s Ten nudes. In 1934, at the age of fifty-four, he collaborated with the woodblock carver Yamagishi Kazue to self-publish a series of deluxe polychrome large-format prints featuring graduating colours and glistening mica backgrounds. Toraji’s tour de force, Ten nudes depicts Japanese women in fashionable 1930s lounge room and bathroom interiors that are decorated with Art Deco furniture, fabrics, rugs, curtains, wallpaper, tiles and fittings. The figurative style is influenced by his travels and studies in Europe, and the prints feature voluptuous nudes sporting soft permed waves, plaits, ponytails or chic bob hairstyles that were favoured by modern Japanese women of the time. In the tradition of ukiyo-e bijin prints (prints of beauties), these contemporary women are captured at private moments in the seclusion of intimate home settings, playing with pets, reading a book or bathing. Their natural, languid poses are accompanied by accessories of pleasure and leisure in the form of stretching cats, a fluffy Pekingese dog, a scattering of mah-jong tiles, a quintessential 1930s blue parrot, and in one case a woman looking at a book of historical woodblock prints that can be interpreted as the artist linking himself to the tradition of ukiyo-e.
The tenth print in the series, and the most risqué, Dance evocatively depicts a stripper illuminated by stage light, in high heels, with a far from modest netted shawl. This famous print is indicative of the freewheeling era and a scene that may have been found at small night club in the back streets of Ginza or in numerous other entertainment districts of 1930s Tokyo.
Due to the series’ sensual and explicit nature and its release being made during times of growing political authoritarianism, police attempted to ban the series at the time of its release and Toraji only produced one further single sheet nude print in 1936. In contrast to these hedonistic works, Toraji became a war artist from 1938 to 1943 and documented Japan’s expansion throughout the Asia-Pacific region with sketches, paintings and even two large canvases depicting Japanese air victories over American planes. After the war Toraji remained active to his death in 1964, producing oil paintings primarily of Japanese coastal landscape, but never achieved again the finesse, notoriety and controversy of his hallmark Ten nudes series from 1934."
Wayne Crothers, Curator, Asian Art, National Gallery of Victoria (in 2015)
[The choice of bold type was our decision.]
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The Brooklyn Museum web site says that the publisher was Ryoku-usō Gahitsu.
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Illustrated:
1) in black and white in 近代日本美人画展 : 伝統木版画を支えた作家たち Exhibition of Modern Japanese Beauties: Meiji, Taishō, Shōwa, Riccar Art Museum, 1982, n.p., no. 72.
2) in color in Ukiyo-e to Shin hanga: The Art of Japanese Woodblock Prints, Mallard Press, 1990, p. 221.
3) in color in The Female Image: 20th Century Prints of Japanese Beauties by Amy Newland and S. Hamanaka, Leiden, Hotei, 2000, p. 171, pl. 240.
4) in black and white in Light in darkness : women in Japanese prints of early Shôwa (1926-1945); curators, Kendall H. Brown, et al., Fisher Gallery, University of Southern California, 1996, p. 69.
modern prints (shin hanga - 新版画) (genre)